


The New Pyre

by Polyzawa (ValarasStark)



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game), Dark Souls (Video Games), 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:07:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26558644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ValarasStark/pseuds/Polyzawa
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	The New Pyre

_The world was dark, and would be for untold eons to come. The gods had decreed there would be light, and spilled blood as gasoline to keep their fires burning. In their cruelty and ignorance, monsters and saints alike were nothing more than kindling._

_What was left of humanity raged, but it recognized this was a new chance. The embers that only carried heat were a reminder of the cause of their agony, and it lashed out. What worlds it could create would now always have the worst of itself at their core._

_There was nothing but time, in this gap between creations. They, the darkness and the dying fire, could see the spires that were yet to be, and the bloodstained streets, but could not touch them._

_And so, when every detail was known to them, their attentions turned outwards._

_See. A void is nothing. Can be anywhere there is emptiness. Resonates with the hunger to be more, and different._

_In another world, a thief with a legacy of blood and cruelty had a new piece of darkness in his heart, alongside all the others._

_Hear. A fire is potential. It burns without care or choice, and will consume the wielder as well as those it is turned against._

_In the same world, a soul is set alight, seeded with the desire to consume all in its path. The child is not a threat yet, but the embers are patient. Their target would endeavor to feed them well._

_Until the Hunt began, this world would be a worthy enough diversion._

\---------------------------------------------------------

The sparks in the heart of the boy that Enji Todoroki was had nurtured themselves into an inferno. As a man, it was a wildfire that blinded him to, and removed him from, his humanity. 

It masked his face and flickered in his eyes. Crowned him as the king he intended to be.

There was no grief in him for the family that was sacrificed and discarded, all to fulfill his ambitions. The essence of a flame that would burn forever was within his grasp.

And after three failures, Shoto was born. 

There would be no weakness or treachery in this one. A single dragon existed in this world, and she would never touch his progeny. Under the instruction of fire itself, the failures of the divine would never repeat. 

This child could be a torch eternal, superior to the lumbering ash Gwyn had been in the end. Softness would be stripped from their soul. Fervor and dedication burned brightly, and the history of rot could not repeat itself in the presence of another consuming force.

The memory of Ariandel was not the fire's. No, this knowledge was of the skin and bones of something defiled and yet great enough to slaughter its way through all resistance before holding the lifebloods of their twisted reality captive, until the end - when not even the dust of monuments and bones could blow listlessly through the desert beneath a ceaseless roll of thunder.

The boy would learn the hatred of death, of the void. Fists would beat him until his heart echoed the drums of the god of war that was his true father, and the conflagration would eventually seduce him to act on the inherited desires.

A lesser man would have been pleased by what the years had wrought, of the results in making a perfect heir. Oh, the fire had consumed Enji's hatred of All Might - had its own, when it remembered another nameless enemy it had eventually that could also ride the winds and let lightning dance upon his skin.

But Endeavor was more than a man now. The constant flames had spread to his beard over time, and he needed even less sleep to maintain his constant war against the threats to society, all tainted with miniscule, but unmistakable, pieces of Dark.

Sometimes, he consumed them, to give the fire enough fuel to maintain appearances.

When he bled, his skin smoked and the red pearls contained the last visions of the lands that were once the realm of gods best left unknown to those who wished to not be weighted with despair and insanity.

All the lessons he had tried to instill in Shoto had failed. One of the failures, though, the girl - she learned _on her own._

Fuyumi had challenged him, one day when beating the boy had left him vomiting onto the ground, revealing his weakness with a coating of ice running up his cheeks as he tried to rip the fire out of himself, or to shove it down.

She had grown ever bolder in the absence of her mother - idly, he wondered why Shoto could not show that spine - and ranted and screamed about standards of family, of the wrongness of his actions.

It was all so despicably **human.**

And he would not leave it unchecked, not in the house of fire he had established. There would be no shadows in the hearts of his children, to take hold and make them fall as knights of old. He would _break them_ before he let them happen.

And so, the back of his hand connected with her face and sent her flying into the nearest wall. Blood slowly trickled from her head wound and the corner of her mouth, staining her white hair while she struggled to stand.

"Anor Londo is long gone. You'd be nothing without the mercy of ash, but you are less than nothing in the Dream. You are _vile._ "

With that whisper, he froze. Her eyes gleamed with the crystallized madness of a new, indelible lesson. His own saw only that she would forever be a failure of his purpose, but oh, she would be strong.

The ichor sizzled in her hair, vanishing, and her laugh, normally frosted slightly with the passive usage of her Quirk instead emitted small sparks that smelt of the blood they consumed.

The girl, now a woman, never entered his sight again after that night.

\---------------------------------------------------------

The moon had called to her, now that she was ready. Carelessly breaking one of the lawn lights on the path and ripping its insides out, she cast them aside. There was no pain when she tore her flesh open and bled into the container.

With shaking hands, Fuyumi pledged herself to the Hunt. To a world where, with this strength she despised being born with, she could play a part in ending misery and cruelty.

She was born anew in a bed of flowers. Wistfully, she ran her hand over them and drank in the sky, just several shades off of her mother's hair. For a while, she was well and truly alone.

She rose when she heard rustling nearby, and the sound of a heavy gate being pushed open. A man stood on the paved stone leading to what looked like a small cabin.

"Ah, you must be new. The scent of blood doesn't overwhelm the rest of you, girl. Come."

His voice was somehow tired, but there was yet a shred of kindness under it. Her first instinct was to reach towards it with both hands, to finally have a childhood, but the silver light of the moon reminded her that family was closed to her now.

So she followed when he went past her, and said nothing when, at the end of the short walk, multiple guns were placed upon the table.

Lit dimly by lanterns shaped like the one in which her blood still burned, and always would, Fuyumi sat on the floor and leaned against a section of cabinet not blocked by numerous books.

"What's your name, girl?"

She hesitated, her now entirely snow white hair falling over her eyes. A voice that was at once alien and familiar fell into her mind, the concepts with which it spoke traveling between neurons and filling her cursed, fiery blood with pressure to speak a single word.

"My name is Maria."

She drew her knees to her chest, all of her will tied up in resisting the urge to cry as even her identity from before was stolen from her. Liberation came at the cost of all familiarity. 

She could sense it all in the suppressed smoke that filled a new part of her. The future she could have had fell away, from seeing her brother grow beyond the pain of never being loved, to ever hearing her mother's voice as she finally got to be free.

"I'm Gehrman. The Hunt seems to have called you early. But I can teach you, nevertheless. You'll be my helper."

Refusing was not an option. Her acceptance was forced from her throat before she could form a thought, and though the moon didn't physically invade her brain, she had still been co-opted for a grander purpose.

One destined for failure. Her work would never make Yharnam a utopia. Beasts and monsters of humans longing for knowledge of things in the cosmos beyond and the oceans below would leave her alone, denied even death until a true savior would be pressed into service by the gods of this age.

The weight of knowing that she would die unloved and alone, only burdening even the eventual image made in her memory, settled on her shoulders. The sudden emptiness inside her was forced to the surface to safeguard herself from any harm. 

The cold chill that settled over her skin as she activated her Quirk for the last time became her second to last truth, if only by the grace of the monstrous god that now held all the strings of her narrative, and perhaps had from the moment she was conceived. She would never betray herself until the end.

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
